The first time that I hear the name Appalshop, I was square dancing at the Brooklyn Brewery, invited by a friend and fellow banjo player more clued in to the local social scene than I. Enticed into the cold winter night by the prospects of live old-time music, unlimited beer and whiskey, and dancing in a crowd of rowdy hipsters in a gentrifying New York City neighborhood, I showed up alone, paid the five dollar cover charge, and proceeded to dance and sweat and laugh for five hours straight. At the end of the night I stopped by the information table and picked up some complementary CDs, bumper stickers, and print and image-covered paper fans like the ones I used to keep cool in my grandparents’ church in rural Ohio as a kid.

I thought nothing particular of the memorabilia until a few weeks later when I actually listened to one of the CDs for the first time. I wasn’t expecting what I found, a collaboration between old-time folk instruments and urban drum-machine beats that somehow managed to capture in three sparely orchestrated tracks a variety of signifiers of past musical traditions. Never before had I heard music that so neatly wrapped up one hundred years or more of American musical traditions. My family moved to the Appalachian foothills of southern Ohio in 1803, and my generation is the first to leave the state in the proceeding two hundred years. Half of the sounds I heard reminded me of my childhood, of concerts in the park and local religious television shows on Friday nights. But the other half reminded me of what I heard on MTV and only saw in person after moving to Chicago, then later California and New York. My interest was piqued, and I immediately looked into the people behind the project.

The CD I received was only one product created by the Appalshop project “Holler to the Hills,” a series of intercorporeal musical collaborations between Appalachian folk musicians and urban hip-hop deejays. Operating out of a small radio station in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a small town of two thousand people in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, radio deejay Nick Szuberla and arts project coordinator Amelia Kirby, brought together Appalachian folk musicians and urban hip-hop deejays in conversation. The project is a response to the increasing number of prisons in rural Appalachian towns, housing a growing population of inmates, a majority of which are minorities from poor urban city centers. According to the project’s online statement, “Holler to the Hood artists and grassroots partners realize that the placement of prisons in rural areas is an opportunity for building alliances between urban and rural communities” . In addition to producing recordings, “Holler to the Hood” hosts regular radio programs, annual winter call-in shows for listeners to communicate to inmates, online interactive installations, and educational programs for children. In addition, Szuberla is in the process of producing a full-length documentary about rural prison systems in the U.S., the soundtrack of which will be comprised of music from the first “Holler to the Hood” recording.

The multifaceted nature of “Holler to the Hood” is typical of Appalshop projects in general. The non-profit organization, now in its thirty-fifth year of existence, has run a full-time radio station in Whitesburg since 1985, featuring styles as varied as “post-feminist commentary mixed with country, rock and blues” and “readings, great driving tunes & the occasional polka” hosted by local residents of all ages. In 1975 the Roadside Theater was implemented, to bring drama and theater often for the first time to small communities in the mountains. The JuneAppal record label currently features over seventy albums recorded locally over the past thirty-five years, and regularly hosts music festivals featuring musicians from southern Appalachia and the surrounding areas. The American Festival Project has been supporting public arts programs and festivals based in Whitesburg since 1988. The Community Media Initiative, in operation since 1997, provides technical and logistical assistance to burgeoning local community organizations. But perhaps the most widely publicized and best known arm of Appalshop is its film center, Headwater Films. Appalshop has produced over ninety documentary and fictional films in the past thirty-five years, all pertaining in some aspect to the particular cultural traditions and social concerns of southern Appalachia.

The film subjects can be roughly divided into two categories. Many celebrate Appalachian culture, be it whittling (Hand Carved, 1981), quilting (Quilting Woman, 1976), furniture-making (Chairmaker, 1975), Minnie Black’s Gourd Band (1988) , even biographies of local musicians such as Ralph Stanley (Ralph Stanley's Story, 2000), Hazel Dickens (Hazel Dickens: It's Hard to Tell the Singer From the Song, 2002), Lily May Ledford (1988), or Morgan Sexton (Morgan Sexton: Banjo Player From Bull Creek, 1991). These documentaries are created to celebrate the lives and works of the artists interviewed but often have additional results. Morgan Sexton had retired and was living a solitary life in rural Kentucky when filmed by Appalshop. He was also invited to perform at an Appalshop-organized folk festival, at which he stunned audiences with an almost anachronistic performance in a style many thought had died out. Later that year, as a result of the publicity garnered by the festival and documentary, Morgan won the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage Award and performed at the Lincoln Center in Washington D.C. For many artists featured in Appalshop documentaries, the publicity sparks a new career and sometimes even a renewed chance at making a living in an area of the country plagued with poverty and high unemployment rates.

The other half of Appalshop’s documentaries directly addresses the side effects and causes of this economic stagnation. For over a century, the dominant economic force in Appalachia was the mining industry, which had obtained mineral rights to many private farms and properties during the late nineteenth century. For many families, working under dangerous conditions in coalmines that often collapsed, flooded, or caught fire was the only source of income, and many Appalshop films document the struggles of area residents to make a living on the meager wages offered by the coal companies (Clinchco: Story of a Mining Town, 1982, Rough Side of the Mountain, 1997), to fight the inevitable black lung disease that resulted from long hours underground (Fightin’ For a Breath, 1995), and to unionize in an attempt to protect their job security (UMWA 1970: A House Divided, 1971).

Starting in the 1950s as underground mines dried up, national companies began strip mining the surfaces of the Appalachian mountains and foothills, encroaching upon individuals’ property under the jurisdiction of a many-generations-old broadside clause. On Our Own Land (1988), interviews local residents who feel trapped by a legal system that honors the broadside clause and big industry, and their struggle to defend their property from destruction by enormous steamshovels and bulldozers. Once the surface form of coal ran out, mining companies abandoned the area, leaving thousands unemployed and destroying local economies. Rough Side of the Mountain (1997) features former coal workers forced to adapt to the changing way of life in the wake of the coal industry and its flight from the mountains. Films such as Fast Food Women (1991), and Bluegrass, Blackmarket (1994) address alternative sources of income for people who are undereducated and unprepared to change careers in the rapidly changing national economy, relegated either to minimum-wage menial labor at fast food restaurants or illegal bootlegging and drug farming hidden from authorities.

A common theme runs throughout Appalshop and Headwaters Films productions: a focus on individuals and a consistent advocacy for worker’s rights and equality regardless of race, class, or gender. A large percentage of the films are made by women and focus on issues of gender inequality and issues that primarily concern women and working wives, from the challenges of maintaining a secondary household income and childrearing (Fast Food Women) to workplace equality in the coalmines (Coalmining Women, 1982). Disabilities and disease common in the area, such as coal-mine caused black lung disease (Fightin’ For a Breath, 1995) and AIDS (Belinda, 1992) are also a focus, as is the impact of health care on the community and its economic infrastructure (Healthy, Wealthy, & Wise: Improving Rural Health Care & Rural Economies, 1997).

Each Appalshop film or project seeks to contribute a personal story or image to replace at least some part of the stereotype that exists in the U.S. towards poor rural communities in the Appalachian Mountains. Like many other marginalized communities, people in rural Appalachia face constant scorn because of economic and educational factors that are beyond their control. In the 1960s, as folklorists involved in the folk revival turned to the Appalachian Mountains to find a “pure” American folk music, the national media gradually became aware of the underdeveloped nature of rural mountain communities. The image of poor struggling Americans went against the predominant narrative of nationwide prosperity and middle-class living. Whitesburg, Kentucky, became the focal location of national attention in the area, and by the late 1960s the small town was nearly continuously occupied by big-city media and news crews doing some story or report about the difficulty local people had in making a living. Images of hungry children, work-worn mothers, and coal-covered miners became icons of Appalachian culture, much to the chagrin of area residents.

The 2000 documentary Stranger with a Camera vividly portrays the events and attitudes in Whitesburg that led to a fatal encounter between filmmaker and local resident. Canadian documentarian Hugh O’Connor traveled with a crew to Whitesburg as part of a series of films on the variety of cultures within the United States. The crew focused on the struggles of coal miners working hard just to get by and struggling with the local coal industry management for fair wages and workplace safety standards. At the end of their stay, on the way out of town, the crew saw a young miner sitting on his porch, still covered in soot, rocking in a chair with a young child playing on his lap. O’Connor got written permission from the man to film what would be a very powerful and poignant scene, but as the crew was filming, the landlord of the property, Hobart Ison, drove up, got out of his truck with a shotgun, and demanded that the crew get off of his land. As they were packing up, O’Connor motioned to Ison that they were putting things back in their vehicle when Ison suddenly shot O’Connor in the chest. The filmmaker laid down, blood coming out of his mouth, and passed away then and there.

Ison’s trial received a substantial amount of media focus, as did the information that eventually became known – namely that local residents were frustrated by the consistently negative portrayal of their community by the national media. Many felt that Ison was justified in protecting his property and the integrity of his community. Ison’s trial ended with a hung jury, and before a new trial could begin he plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was paroled after one year of a ten year sentence. He never felt remorse, and is still seen by many locals as a hero.

This frustration with visiting filmmakers and the uninformed, frequently insensitive representation of Appalachian culture that they perpetuated on the national media was addressed by the Office of Economic Opportunity and the American Film Institute, which combined under the auspices of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty effort to provide film and television opportunities and careers for minority communities in the U.S. The non-profit organization benefited local communities economically, by providing training and employment (Appalshop is currently one of the largest employers in rural Kentucky ). But it also provides the opportunity for self-expression, and a chance to challenge and disrupt dominant stereotypes of their community created by the national media, big-city folklorists, and news reporters.

Faye Ginsburg, Director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History and Professor of Anthropology at New York University, has written extensively on the benefits and potential perils of indigenous and local media. For Ginsburg, the use of media and its technologies to find a voice among the various national and international discourses surrounding a community’s position is a sort of “cultural activism,” a “self-conscious mediation and mobilization of culture in the late twentieth century” For the residents of Whitesburg and the surrounding mountains, Appalshop provides a public platform with which to express their own opinions and desires and promote a community political agenda, or as Ginsburg states, “to assert their presence in the polities that encompass them and to more easily enter into much larger movements for social transformation for the recognition and redress of human and cultural rights, processes in which media play an increasingly important role.”

Ginsburg also points to the power of transnational (or in this case transcommunal) collaboration and cultural affinities present in the production of media self-representation. In Coalmining Women, we meet female coalminers in Kentucky, West Virginia, even as far as Colorado, all working together for gender equality and a fair chance to work in the mines. In one scene, a woman who receives worker’s compensation for an injury she endured while working in a mine talks about a visit from Welsh coal miners who commented that they wouldn’t even begin using the equipment she was given, that they would demand safer work conditions. The acknowledgement that the problems women coalminers in Kentucky face are found throughout the world creates a political affinity bonding groups in disparate locations in a common struggle. The same can be said of the “Holler to the Hood” project, which highlights the common struggles of poor rural and urban communities and creates an avenue for dialog based around the injustices of federal and state correctional institutions.

The political nature of Appalshop’s work is not a universal in Eastern Kentucky, and its organizers will be the first to acknowledge that their ideological framework, while it is consistent and important for the struggle for economic and social equality for Appalachian communities, is not to be taken as representative of the region at large. When Nixon’s administration shifted the focus of the OEO/AFI project from community service to vocational training in the early 1970s, many Appalshop volunteers and employees saw the move as damaging. Because no television studios other than Appalshop existed in eastern Kentucky, the surplus of trained media workers would only move away from the area to large cities where they could find employment, straining a valuable educated workforce from Appalachia. Consequently, federal funding decreased and Appalshop had to look elsewhere for funding. In 1980, only a small portion of the organization’s budget was funded by federal groups such as the NEA. About half came from private and other-level governmental grants, and about fifty percent was earned through video distribution. Headwaters films have been a financial and publicity mainstay for the successful operation of Appalshop consistently for the past twenty-five years.

But the other aspects of the organization are just as powerful in terms of garnering (or losing) support. Last year local politicians protested the state-level funding of Appalshop because a deejay on WMMT allegedly made an unpatriotic remark on the air. WMMT operators declared that, although they might personally disagree with what the deejay said, they were against the censoring of personal expression on community airwaves. Although Appalshop continued to operate successfully due to the reception of additional funds from other sources, the $300,000 lost did make things difficult for the radio station. The outrage targeted toward the radio station is demonstrative of a general antipathy toward their project, which in its fight for worker’s rights and fair labor, has ruffled the feathers of more than a few powerful local businesspeople and politicians.

But Appalshop has also received criticism for painting too sunny a picture of Appalachian culture and society. Jacob Young, the filmmaker responsible for the Dancing Outlaw series of documentaries about West Virginia resident Jesco White, which paint a harsh, negative, sometimes condescending portrait of Appalachian culture, has criticized Appalshop for whitewashing the everyday problems common in rural mountain communities. According to Young, "they always show people caning chairs or playing banjos, people who are wise and humble - all the good Appalachian traits," Young said. "There's room for different interpretations of the culture." While Young’s comments reveal a thin knowledge of Appalshop’s oeuvre, they are reflective of a general perception of Appalshop’s work. Despite the commitment to social justice, Appalshop is forced to depend upon the success of softer, less overtly-political work such as its biographies of musicians and celebrations of arts and cultural activities.

This, then, is how I found myself drinking Maker’s Mark and promenading with a bevy of hipsters late one Saturday night in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. Appalshop is increasingly successful in obtaining notoriety and publicity through clever promotional events and corporate sponsorship. Appalshop’s strategy is roughly two-fold: sell culture to outsiders curious about Appalachian folk traditions, and use the profits to provide health care, education, and other vital services for the community at home. It is possible to criticize the organization for playing to common misconceptions of Appalachian culture as backwards and antiquated, selling the novelty of its high lonesome sound and ruckus-raising dance tunes in line with the already questionable intentions of the 1960s folk-revival scene and its allegorical narrative of salvage ethnography.

But I have seen how bad life can be for people in Appalachia. My aunt teaches Spanish at a high school across the street from the state penitentiary in a small town. The student body practically disappears on execution days, choosing cross the road and protest. When the riots occurred back in 1993 my grandmother played the organ at half of the funerals for the prison guards. The summer after I graduated from college, I looked for work in my hometown, finding only two options, either bagging popcorn for twelve hours and seventy dollars a day or stuffing junk mail envelopes for even less. I personally feel that the benefits far outweigh the risks of perpetuating negative stereotypes. When a community has control over its own image, it has the right to mediate that image in any way it sees fit.